Recoleta Cemetery
Interesting facts
- It was inaugurated on 17 November 1822 under the name Cementerio del Norte, the Northern Cemetery.
- Governor Martín Rodríguez, who founded the cemetery together with his minister Bernardino Rivadavia, was himself eventually buried there.
- Prosper Catelin, the French engineer who laid out the original grounds, also designed the present facade of the Buenos Aires Metropolitan Cathedral.
- According to a widely told story, the heiress Rufina Cambaceres was entombed alive in 1902 at age 19, after doctors mistook a cataleptic fit for death.
- Rufina's Art Nouveau tomb in Carrara marble shows a life-size statue of her with a hand on the door of her own mausoleum.
- A Neo-Gothic tomb holds Liliana Crociati, killed by an avalanche in Innsbruck in 1970; a bronze statue shows her in her wedding dress, her hand resting on her dog.
- Among the graves is that of Isabelle Colonna-Walewski, a granddaughter of Napoleon who died as an infant in 1847.
- The remains of the 19th-century ruler Juan Manuel de Rosas lay in Southampton, England, for more than a century before being brought here in 1989.
- Two Nobel laureates rest here: Carlos Saavedra Lamas, Latin America's first Peace Prize winner, and the biochemist Luis Federico Leloir, Nobel laureate in Chemistry.
- A colony of stray cats lives among the tombs; it numbered about 60 in the 1960s and has shrunk to roughly a dozen through adoption drives.
Why it is worth it
Recoleta Cemetery in Buenos Aires is a city of the dead laid out like a city of the living: a grid of paved alleys lined with trees and some 4,700 above-ground vaults, many of them small chapels, temples and miniature palaces. Covering about 5.5 hectares in the elegant Recoleta district, it holds the tombs of presidents, generals, writers and scientists, and walking its lanes is a lesson in how Argentina's elite chose to be remembered — in marble, bronze and stained glass imported from Paris and Milan in the decades around 1900.
The ground was once the garden of a convent of the Recollect friars, from whom the district takes its name. After the order was expelled, Governor Martín Rodríguez and his minister Bernardino Rivadavia opened the site in November 1822 as the first public cemetery of Buenos Aires, with a plan drawn by the French engineer Prosper Catelin. The Italian-born architect Juan Antonio Buschiazzo gave it its present form in a remodelling of 1881, including the Doric-columned neoclassical entrance. Beside the gate stands the Basilica of Our Lady of the Pillar, the old friars' church, completed in 1732 and one of the oldest in the city.
The mausoleums read like a catalogue of styles — Art Deco, Art Nouveau, Baroque, Neo-Gothic — and nearly a hundred of them are protected as national historic monuments. Most visitors look for the tomb of Eva Perón, the country's most famous first lady; others seek out Admiral William Brown, founder of the Argentine navy, the Nobel laureates Luis Federico Leloir and Carlos Saavedra Lamas, the poet José Hernández and the writer Victoria Ocampo. The tomb of Rufina Cambaceres, a young woman whose story has grown into a legend of premature burial, draws its own steady stream of visitors. A small colony of cats, much reduced from its peak, still suns itself on the steps.
Getting there
The cemetery is in the Recoleta neighbourhood of Buenos Aires, about 1 km from Retiro and its railway stations. Aeroparque Jorge Newbery (AEP), the city's domestic and regional airport, is about 4 km away.
Plan your visit
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Nearby places
- El Ateneo Grand Splendid 0.9 km · theatre-building
- Teatro Colón 1.7 km · opera-house
- Puente de la Mujer 3.4 km · bridge
- Caminito 6.3 km · pedestrian-street
On these lists
From the encyclopaedia
La Recoleta Cemetery is a cemetery located in the Recoleta neighbourhood of Buenos Aires, Argentina. It contains the graves of notable people, including Eva Perón, presidents of Argentina, Nobel Prize winners, the founder of the Argentine Navy, and military commanders such as Julio Argentino Roca. In 2011, the BBC hailed it as one of the world's best cemeteries, and in 2013, CNN listed it among the 10 most beautiful cemeteries in the world.
Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 4.0
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